A human-made spacecraft is finally heading to the center of the Solar System. NASA’s first launch window for the Parker Solar Probe begins at 3:33 a.m. ET this Saturday, and if all goes well, the ship will then begin its journey to the Sun.
Instead of relying on just his imagination to make Lego toys fly, Adam Woodworth supersizes his favorite sets and upgrades them with motors and electronics so they can take to the skies all by themselves. But with a blocky rotor that’s clearly not designed for flight, can you figure out how this Lego helicopter…
If you’re arachnophobic, I hate to tell you this, but spiders can fly.
A lot of us are still scratching our heads over Disney’s decision to spend millions of dollars building Pandora—The World of Avatar in its Animal Kingdom park, especially with Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge opening so soon. But at least the themed area, which is celebrating its one year anniversary, led to the creation of…
Several news outlets have claimed that scientists have created a “cloaking device” like those seen on Star Trek, but that’s not quite what happened. The cloaking devices on Star Trek bend light to render an object invisible, and the new device merely deflects sound. The technology also isn’t so new, as others are…
A team of physicists has figured out how to bend diamonds, according to a new paper. Okay, we’re talking about nano-scale diamond needles here. But it’s an impressive feat, because while diamonds are known for their hardness, these rocks will break if they are bent even a tiny bit.
Are you a billionaire suffering from wrist cramps brought on by the endless stacks of checks you need to endorse? A two-dollar rubber stamp is one solution, but more befitting of your fiduciary status could be Jaquet Droz’s Signing Machine, which uses sophisticated clockwork mechanisms to flawlessly recreate your…
NASA test dummies go through a lot so humans don’t have to. They get used for brutal impact tests, and sometimes said tests don’t go so well... for the dummies, not necessarily the scientists.
A grand jury in Wyandotte County, Kansas has returned an indictment against waterpark and resort operator Schlitterbahn and one of its managers, charging them with “involuntary manslaughter, aggravated battery, and reckless endangerment of a child” over the 2016 death-by-decapitation of 10-year-old Caleb Schwab on the…
Researchers at Northwestern University think they’ve stumbled upon an unexpected new use for the so-called supermaterial graphene: an easy-to-apply, safer, and sturdier black hair dye that could give other permanent dyes a run for their money. The new dye even made hair immune to frizz and static electricity.
The death toll from the collapse of a pedestrian bridge over a road at Miami’s Florida International University on March 15th has risen to at least six, with the university admitting on Saturday that one of the project engineers had waved off concerns over a crack just hours before.
Just when you thought that the fidget spinner fad had gone the way of the dodo bird, hoverboards, and 3D TVs, a Japanese company, MinebeaMitsumi Inc., known for manufacturing electronic components, and Mitsubishi, used 50 engineers to design and build a near-flawless fidget spinner over a six-month period that…
Zoom in close on the center of the picture above, and you can spot something you perhaps never thought you’d be able to see: a single atom. Here is a close-up if, you’re having trouble:
At some point in your life you’ve almost certainly marveled at the classic drinking bird toy, and probably lost a few brain cells trying to figure out how it works. Don’t be ashamed if you never successfully unravelled the science, though, as engineerguy Bill Hammack explains, even Einstein apparently couldn’t crack it
10 minutes ago, I was cautiously optimistic that one day we’d live and work side-by-side with robots in perfect harmony. Then Boston Dynamics posted a video of its ATLAS humanoid robot performing incredible jumps and backflips, and now I’m ready to go find a cave somewhere and hide.
“Glass is an amorphous solid that flows like a liquid,” you’d probably say if you were asked to define the stuff. Is that true, though? What if I told you, for example, that the old myth, that old windows are thicker at the bottom because the glass has flowed a little bit, was false? Glass is an incredibly complex…
In the classic 1966 American science fiction film Fantastic Voyage, a submarine crew was miniaturized and injected into a body to fix a blood clot in the brain. That’s obviously not how future medical science is going to work, but the notion of creating microscopic machines to perform complex tasks is certainly on…
Do you deliberately avoid visiting friends who live in multi-story buildings without an elevator? No one would fault you—having to climb even just a single flight of stairs is like being forced to workout against your will. But thanks to engineers at Georgia Tech and Emory University, stairs might one day do all the…
One of the biggest engineering challenges of building a towering skyscraper isn’t keeping the structure from falling over, it’s moving all the people around inside of it. To improve efficiency, and facilitate the construction of even taller buildings, Germany’s ThyssenKrupp has completely redesigned elevators so that…
We’ve all seen the grade school science experiment where sticking a couple of electrodes into a potato produces enough current to power a small light bulb. But engineer Marek Baczynski took that experiment several steps further, building what could be the world’s first autonomous potato—and the ultimate housepet.
